Author: Stefan Brunner

About: Stefan Brunner

Stefan started his career as a London banker in M&A and private equity, evaluating and authoring business plans, and performing financial analytics for due diligence reports. Intrigued by the upcoming Internet, he shifted his focus to leveraging technology in banking. He designed and built global hyper-scale network and security infrastructure for some of the largest financial institutions for Juniper Networks. Maintaining his bifocal business interest, he served as Product Line Manager for Juniper Networks, and has a history as an entrepreneur and founder.
Excited in seeing the potential in cloud based security systems and sandboxing, Stefan joined the pioneer in sandboxing technology SonicWALL in 2014 through DELL as their Lead Solutions Architect.
Stefan earned a Master in Business Administration, triple majoring in Innovations Research and Technology Management, Information and Communications Economics, and Accounting from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, and an executive degree in Telecommunications Engineering from UC Berkeley. Stefan earned countless industry certifications, including JNCIE.
Stefan has published an O’Reilly bestseller on security and countless white papers.

Cyber criminals prefer to receive ransom in the cyber currency Bitcoin because it is anonymous. The truth is “sort of.” Let’s take a closer look at how Bitcoins work, and how the WannaCry perpetrators, possibly the Lazarus Group, want to be paid.

Bitcoins are different from fiat currencies because, with Bitcoins, no actual coins or bills exist, not even digital ones.

I often get asked, “Why should we implement SSL inspection? We just upgraded our security from stateful inspection to deep inspection. If something is encrypted, is it not encrypted for a reason, for being secure?” Let me explain…

Back in the day, network traffic was well behaved. If you were a software vendor and wanted to offer a new application, you had to sign up with IANA and get a reserved port for your application.

Scaling security devices is much more difficult than scaling routers or switches. A router acts on the destination IP lookup only, a 32 or 128 bit fixed length value, whereas a switch acts on a 48 bit fixed length MAC address, looking up on the destination MAC and adding the source MAC to a lookup table.